Nausea (7 page)

She still speaks. He pushes her roughly. They look at each other, uncertain, then the man thrusts his hands in his pockets and leaves without looking back.

The man has disappeared. A scant three yards separate me from this woman now. Suddenly, deep, hoarse sounds come from her, tear at her and fill the whole street with extraordinary violence.

26

"Charles, I beg you, you know what I told you? Charles, come back, I've had enough, I'm too miserable!"

I pass so close to her that I could touch her. It's . . . but how can I believe that this burning flesh, this face shining with sor-sow? . . . and yet I recognize the scarf, the coat and the large wine-coloured birthmark on the right hand; it is Lucie, the charwoman. I dare not offer her my support, but she must be able to call for it if need be: I pass before her slowly, looking at her. Her eyes stare at me but she seems not to see me; she looks as though she were lost in her suffering. I take a few steps, turn back. . . .

Yes, it's Lucie. But transfigured, beside herself, suffering with a frenzied generosity. I envy her. There she is, standing straight, holding out her arms as if awaiting the stigmata; she opens her mouth, she is suffocating. I feel as though the walls have grown higher, on each side of the street, that they have come closer together, that she is at the bottom of a well. I wait a few moments: I am afraid she will fall: she is too sickly to stand this unwonted sorrow. But she does not move, she seems turned to stone, like everything around her. One moment I wonder if I have not been mistaken about her, if this is not her true nature which has suddenly been revealed to me.

Lucie gives a little groan. Her hand goes to her throat and she opens wide, astonished eyes. No, it is not from herself that she draws strength to suffer. It comes to her from the outside . . . from the boulevard. She should be taken by the arm, led back to the lights, in the midst of people, into quiet, pink streets: down there one cannot suffer so acutely; she would be mollified, she would find her positive look again and the usual level of her sufferings.

I turn my back on her. After all, she is lucky. I have been much too calm these past three years. I can receive nothing more from these tragic solitudes than a little empty purity. I leave.

Thursday, 11.30

I have worked two hours in the reading-room. I went down to the Cour des Hypotheques to smoke a pipe. A square paved with pinkish bricks. The people of Bouville are proud of it because it dates from the eighteenth century. At the entrance to the Rue Chamade and the Rue Suspedard, old chains bar the way to vehicles. Women in black who come to exercise their dogs glide beneath the arcades, along the walls. They rarely come out into the full light, but they cast ingenue glances from the corner of

27their eyes, on the statue of Gustave Impetraz. They don't know the name of this bronze giant but they see clearly from his frock coat and top hat that he was someone from the beau-monde. He holds his hat in his left hand, placing his right on a stack of papers: it is a little as though their grandfather were there on the pedestal, cast in bronze. They do not need to look at him very long to understand that he thought as they do, exactly as they do, on all subjects. At the service of their obstinately narrow, small ideas he has placed the authority and immense erudition drawn from the papers crushed in his hand. The women in black feel soothed, they can go peacefully minding their own business, running their households, walking their dogs out: they no longer have the responsibility of standing up, for their Christian ideals the high ideals which they get from their fathers; a man of bronze has made himself their guardian.

The encyclopedia devotes a few lines to this personage; I read them last year. I had set the volume on the window ledge; I could see Impetraz' green skull through the pane. I discovered that he flourished around 1890. He was a school inspector. He painted and drew charming sketches and wrote three books: Popularity and the Ancient Greeks (1887), Rollins Pedagogy (1891) and a poetic Testament in 1899. He died in 1902, to the deep regret of his dependents and people of good taste.

I lean against the front of the library. I suck out my pipe which threatens to go out. I see an old lady fearfully leaving the gallery of arcades, looking slyly and obstinately at Impetraz. She suddenly grows bolder, she crosses the courtyard as fast as her legs can carry her, stops for a moment in front of the statue, her jaws trembling. Then she leaves, black against the pink pavement, and disappears into a chink in the wall.

This place might have been gay, around 1800, with its pink bricks and houses. Now there is something dry and evil about it, a delicate touch of horror. It comes from that fellow up there on his pedestal. When they cast this scholar in bronze they also turned out a sorcerer.

I look at Impetraz full in the face. He has no eyes, hardly any nose, and beard eaten away by that strange leprosy which sometimes descends, like an epidemic, on all the statues in one neighbourhood. He bows; on the left hand side near his heart his waistcoat is soiled with a light green stain. He looks. He does not live, but neither is he inanimate. A mute power emanates from him: like a wind driving me backwards: Impetraz would 28

like to chase me out of the Cour des Hypotheques. But I shall not leave before I finish this pipe.

A great, gaunt shadow suddenly springs up behind me. I jump.

"Excuse me, Monsieur, I didn't mean to disturb you. I saw your lips moving. You were undoubtedly repeating passages from your book." He laughs. "You were hunting Alexandrines."

I look at the Self-Taught Man with stupor. But he seems surprised at my surprise:

"Should we not, Monsieur, carefully avoid Alexandrines in prose?"

I have been slightly lowered in his estimation. I ask him what he's doing here at this hour. He explains that his boss has given him the day off and he came straight to the library; that he is not going to eat lunch, that he is going to read till closing time. I am not listening to him any more, but he must have strayed from his original subject because I suddenly hear:

". . . to have, as you, the good fortune of writing a book." I have to say something. "Good fortune," I say, dubiously.

He mistakes the sense of my answer and rapidly corrects himself:

"Monsieur, I should have said: 'merit.'" We go up the steps. I don't feel like working. Someone has left Eugenie Grandet on the table, the book is open at page 27. I pick it up, mechanically, and begin to read page 27, then page 28: I haven't the courage to begin at the beginning. The Self-Taught Man has gone quickly to the shelves along the wall; he brings back two books which he places on the table, looking like a dog who has found a bone. "What are you reading?"

He seems reluctant to tell me: he hesitates, rolls his great, roving eyes, then stiffly holds out the books. Peat-Mosses and Where to Find Them by Larbaletrier, and HiUrpadesa, or, Useful Instruction by Lastex. So? I don't know what's bothering him: the books are definitely decent. Out of conscience I thumb through Hitofadesa and see nothing but the highest types of sentiment.

3.00 V.m.

I have given up Eugenie Grandet and begun work without any heart in it. The Self-Taught Man, seeing that I am writing,

29observes me with respectful lust. From time to time I raise my head a little and see the immense, stiff collar and the chicken-like neck coming out of it. His clothes are shabby but his shirt is dazzling white. He has just taken another book from the same shelf, I can make out the title upside-down: The Arrow of Caudebec, A Norman Chronicle by Mile Julie Lavergne. The Self-Taught Man's choice of reading always disconcerts me.

Suddenly the names of the authors he last read come back to my mind: Lambert, Langlois, Larbaletrier, Lastex, Lavergne. It is a revelation; I have understood the Self-Taught Man's method; he teaches himself alphabetically.

I study him with a sort of admiration. What will-power he must have to carry through, slowly, obstinately, a plan on such a vast scale. One day, seven years ago (he told me he had been a student for seven years) he came pompously into this reading-room. He scanned the innumerable books which lined the walls and he must have said, something like Rastignac, "Science! It is up to us." Then he went and took the first book from the first shelf on the far right; he opened to the first page, with a feeling of respect and fear mixed with an unshakable decision. Today he has reached "L"-"K" after "J," "L" after "K." He has passed brutally from the study of coleopterae to the quantum theory, from a work on Tamerlaine to a Catholic pamphlet against Darwinism, he has never been disconcerted for an instant. He has read everything; he has stored up in his head most of what anyone knows about parthenogenesis, and half the arguments against vivisection. There is a universe behind and before him. And the day is approaching when closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left: he will say to himself, "Now what?"

This is his lunch time; innocently he eats a slice of bread and a bar of Gala Peter. His eyes are lowered and I can study at leisure his fine, curved lashes, like a woman's. When he breathes he gives off an aroma of old tobacco mixed with the sweet scent of chocolate.

Friday, 3.00 -p.m.

A little more and I would have fallen into the lure of the mirror. I avoid it only to fall into that of the window: indolent, arms dangling, I go to the window. The Building Yard, the Fence, the Old Stationùthe Old Station, the Fence, the Building Yard. I give such a big yawn that tears come into my eyes. I hold my pipe in my right hand and my tobacco in my left. I 30

should fill this pipe. But I don't have the heart to do it. My arms hang loosely, I lean my forehead against the windowpane. That old woman annoys me. She trots along obstinately, with unseeing eyes. Sometimes she stops, frightened, as if an invisible fear had brushed against her. There she is under my window, the wind blows her skirts against her knees. She stops, straightens her kerchief. Her hands tremble. She is off again: now I can see her from the back. Old wood louse! I suppose she's going to turn right, into the Boulevard Victor-Noir. That gives her a hundred yards to go: it will take her ten minutes at the rate she's going, ten minutes during which time I shall stay like this, watching her, my forehead glued against the window. She is going to stop twenty times, start again, stop again . . .

I see the future. It is there, poised over the street, hardly more dim than the present. What advantage will accrue from its realisation:1 The old woman stumps further and further away, she stops, pulls at a grey lock of hair which escapes from her kerchief. She walks, she was there, now she is here ... I don't know where I am any more: do I see her motions, or do I foresee them? I can no longer distinguish present from future and yet it lasts, it happens little by little; the old woman advances in the deserted street, shuffling her heavy, mannish brogues. This is time, time laid bare, coming slowly into existence, keeping us waiting, and when it does come making us sick because we realise it's been there for a long time. The old woman reaches the corner of the street, no more than a bundle of black clothes. All right then, it's new, she wasn't there a little while ago. But it's a tarnished deflowered newness, which can never surprise. She is going to turn the corner, she turnsùduring an eternity.

I tear myself from the window and stumble across the room; I glue myself against the looking glass. I stare at myself, I disgust myself: one more eternity. Finally I flee from my image and fall on the bed. I watch the ceiling, I'd like to sleep.

Calm. Calm. In can no longer feel the slipping, the rustling of time. I see pictures on the ceiling. First rings of light, then crosses. They flutter. And now another picture is forming, at the bottom of my eyes this time. It is a great, kneeling animal. I see its front paws and pack saddle. The rest is in fog. But I recognize it: it is a camel I saw at Marrakesh, tethered to a stone. He knelt and stood up six times running; the urchins laughed and shouted at him.

It was wonderful two years ago: all I had to do was close to

31my eyes and my head would start buzzing like a bee-hive: I could conjure faces, trees, houses, a Japanese girl in Kamaishiki washing herself naked in a wooden tub, a dead Russian, emptied of blood by a great, gaping wound, all his blood in a pool beside him. I could recapture the taste of kouskouss, the smell of olive oil which fills the streets of Burgos at noon, the scent of fennel floating through the Tetuan streets, the piping of Greek shepherds; I was touched. This joy was used up a long time ago. Will it be reborn today?

A torrid sun moves stiffly in my head like a magic lantern slide. A fragment of blue sky follows; after a few jolts it becomes motionless. I am all golden within. From what Moroccan (or Algerian or Syrian) day did this flash suddenly detach itself? I let myself Row into the past.

Meknes. What was that man from the hills likeùthe one who frightened us in the narrow street between the Berdaine mosque and that charming square shaded by a mulberry tree? He came towards us, Anny was on my right. Or on my left?

This sun and blue sky were only a snare. This is the hundredth time I've let myself be caught. My memories are like coins in the devil's purse: when you open it you find only dead leaves.

Now I can only see the great, empty eye socket of the hill tribesman. Is this eye really his? The doctor at Baku who explained the principle of state abortions to me was also blind of one eye, and the white empty socket appears every time I want to remember his face. Like the Norns these two men have only one eye between them with which they take turns.